“Cancel Culture”

Over the past month, Lehigh University has taken actions to downgrade a video it had originally posted in late January by one of its professors on poverty and race after students on social media denounced the video as supporting racist thought.

Lehigh’s College of Business had asked Frank Gunter, professor of economics at Lehigh, to create a brief video from his recent op-ed “Three Myths About Poverty.” They posted his video on Jan. 28 as part of a series of videos directed at advising the new Biden administration on policy issues.

How will Emmanuel Macron mark the general’s difficult bicentenary?

Paris may have avenues, boulevards, bridges and a railway station named after their most famous military leader’s armies, battles and treaties. But nowhere will you find an Avenue or Place or Boulevard named after Napoleon Bonaparte himself — apart from a narrow Rue Bonaparte on the Left Bank.

In 21st century France, Bonaparte is everywhere. And nowhere.

The cancel culture we are living in should itself be canceled. That must be obvious to most people, given the way in which it stifles the free expression of ideas, but I think there’s more happening than that. Cancel culture is the culmination of the cyberbullying, spiritually (and, sometimes, literally) homicidal social media experiment we’ve been running on the entire human race since the advent of venues like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.

The character assassins of cancel culture come for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The media of what used to be a free country has become indistinguishable from the press operations of Pravda or Der Sturmer whose stock in trade were fawning stories about Communist and Nazi leaders and character assassinations discrediting their opponents.

Today’s blacklisters obsess over the injustice of others so much that they can’t see their own.

“Hey,” the bartender says of C3PO and R2D2. “We don’t serve their kind here.”

Forty-four years later, the Palpatines of the Star Wars empire say the same thing to rebels.

Disney wimps fired Gina Carano over social media for an opinion she expressed on social media. When did we reach the point where the latter rather than the former became unacceptable?

LONDON, ONT. — The owner of a bar in downtown London, Ont. is standing by a sign that has caused outrage as some have deemed its messages racist.

“Mr. Ford History will show lockdowns caused more damage 2 the public then the China virus,” is what the sign outside the Ale House on Dundas Street read earlier this week.

Backlash began to spread online and the sign was changed, but for many the change was no better.

Brought to you by the same “anti-racists” who claim having white skin makes you a racist I bet.

h/t David

In a recent article, “A Fraught Balancing Act,” Inside Higher Ed reported that “Some college leaders quickly cracked down on students and faculty voicing support for rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol. Others walked a fine line between protecting free speech rights and tamping down incendiary language.” Note well that what was cracked down upon was “support.”

In a world where, sooner or later, everything is racialised, it was only a matter of time before classical music became a target of the crusade against whiteness. So I wasn’t particularly shocked when I read this headline in the New York Times: ‘Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles over Race and Free Speech.’